Orange Lowers NY-Brazil Latency

Telecommunications and network provider Orange Trading Solutions is claiming to have achieved the lowest-latency market data and trading connectivity for brokers and traders between New York and São Paulo, Brazil for access between BM&F Bovespa and exchanges in North America, as a result of reducing latency over the network it introduced at the end of last year by between 5 and 10 percent to provide roundtrip latency of 115 milliseconds.

Officials say the vendor was able to reduce latency on the route by taking alternative paths where possible on either end of the dual undersea cables between Equinix’s NY4 datacenter in Secaucus, NJ, and BM&F Bovespa’s datacenter, provided by an unnamed third-party vendor, and by deploying the most up-to-date switching technologies at its points of presence and client sites in New York and Brazil.

“My research and development team is always pushing for new technology, and the way you configure switches and routers is very important, as is constantly optimizing the way you send traffic and build your service,” says Sebastien Jaouen, head of trading community services at Orange, adding that the vendor expects to achieve further latency reductions, as long as the cost-benefit still delivers a compelling case for investment.

“We have a Layer 2 switched network, which is key to getting these kinds of latencies, because we can dictate the path of each section of the route, and we can pre-reserve bandwidth on each path it takes, as it’s important not just to have low latency, but also predictable latency,” he says.

Undersea cable provider GlobeNet Brasil Telecom claims a lower roundtrip latency figure of 110 milliseconds, though Jaouen says Orange’s figure includes every local circuit between clients and the exchange. He says more than 20 firms—including banks and interdealer brokers looking to offer local execution services to clients—are already using the route to take advantage of lower levels of algorithmic trading in Brazil than in North America.